Health and urban mortality experience before and throughout the health transition

Public health impact of the dual epidemic of Tuberculosis and HIV poses a major challenge today, particularly in high prevalent countries like India. HIV is the most powerful risk factor for progression from TB infection to TB disease. TB in turn accelerates the progression of HIV to AIDS and shortens survival of patients with HIV infection. The two diseases are a fatal combination and far more destructive together than either disease alone. There have been many studies on HIV to TB transition but reverse link needs to be probed. Data from RNTCP (Revised National TB Control Program Management) and MDACS (Mumbai District AIDS Control Society) show that HIV infection rate among TB patients in Maharashtra is around five per cent. Cure rate of HIV infected TB patients dwindles by 14 per cent vis-a-vis NSP-TB infection alone. Mortality rate of TB-HIV co-infection is four times higher while defaulter rate is almost double against pure TB patients. Efforts to tackle TB and HIV have been largely in-congruent; despite their overlapping epidemiology. Availability of up-to-date, good quality data on HIV-TB co-infected patients and Institutionalized integration of TB and HIV control is therefore, imperative for improving compliance thereby enhancing TB-HIV control management program efficacy.

Key words: TB, HIV, Co-infection

This research aims to study the behavior of mortality in Montevideo and its countryside, from the colonial period through the first decades of Uruguay as an independent country. First, we analyze extraordinary mortality, trying to identify years of mortality crises and what was said about their nature. Second, ordinary mortality is studied, ie, its level and characteristics in normal times, with emphasis in the composition of causes of death, for those years iwith available data.
Demographic information of Montevideo and its countryside was developed from 10 parish registers.
The outcomes achieved are result of the application of different demographic methodologies, ranging from population projections (inverse projection) and estimated mortality level indicators, to the use of specific methods to identify years of mortality crisis (Dupâquier as well as Del Panta-Livi Bacci methodologies).
Furthermore, an epidemiological analysis is made, standarizing the different lists of causes of death to a classification that would allow its interpretation in the context of the epidemiological transition.
The results found in this study agree, broadly, with what at first suspected. Throughout the entire period we find a high level of mortality, with characteristical pretransitional mortality fluctuations.

This study analyzes the mortality trajectory and its characteristics in the City of São Paulo, between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, using the data from Anuário Demógrafo-sanitário (Demographic-sanitary year book).
In that time, this city lived an intense urbanization and industrialization and suffered a very strong impact of international immigration. The arrival of a large number of immigrants (mainly Italians, Portuguese and Spanish) in a short period of time strongly affected the population structure and dynamics of this city. In 1886, São Paulo had 47.697 inhabitants, increasing to 1.033.202 in 1934.
Although most of the population lived in poor living conditions and also poor working conditions, which in some years had facilitated the spread of epidemics and endemic diseases, the São Paulo State health policy in the early years of the twentieth century, as sanitation programs, immunization, vectors control and improvements in nutrition, led to a decline in mortality rates in the City of São Paulo and also other localities of the State in the end of the 1920’s, in the beginning of the 1940’s and the 1950’s, with the popularization of antibiotics in Brazil.

This paper has two objectives: to present a detailed demographic analysis of the changing patterns of neonatal mortality in the rural parishes of Veneto region during the first demographic transition, and to provide a definitive answer to the unresolved debate of impact of baptismal practices on mortality.
The analysis is developed using data related to children born between
1816 and 1866 in rural and urban parishes of the province of Padua. Such unpublished information come from asburgical parochial archives found in reference parishes.
Cox proportional-hazards regression models investigate the risk of dying during the week after baptism. A specific analysis has been computed using data on
baptism, to understand if the risk of dying of a child increases with the rising of
time spend from birth to baptism.
A strong relation between seasonality and death emerges from
models. Neonatal mortality reaches its peaks during winter season. Environmental
factors seem to have an impact on death: the parish of birth clearly confirms differences in the risk of dying. While we can affirm the presence of interaction
between baptismal practices and seasonality on explain risk of dying, we can only provide tentative results on the effect of baptismal practices on risk of death.

The aim of this paper is to study mortality differences between migrants and natives in the Western European port cities of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Stockholm (1850-1920). We will make use of life-course data from the Antwerp COR* database, the Historical Sample of the Netherlands and the Stockholm Historical Database. For the description of differences in mortality between migrants and natives we will make use of Kaplan Meier curves. We will fit an event history model (Cox proportional hazard model) in which time to death functions as the dependent variable. Independent variables of interest are sex, country of origin, socio-economic status, marital status, literacy (as an indicator of education), urban-rural background, city quarter of residence and cohort.

This paper is an attempt to analyse the relationships between demographic and urban transitions using long-term historical data from Belgium (1841-1976), and compare these transitions with that of Sweden (1750-1955). The methodology differs from previous analyses in that it identifies the respective roles of fertility, mortality and migration in the transition. While nuancing the role of urban mortality in triggering early demographic transition, results reinstate migration as the major component of urban transition. Theoretical consequences on the role of economic changes in urban and demographic transitions are then drawn.

Around 1900, after centuries of disadvantage, urban life expectancy passed its rural counterparts. The process can be linked with two broad phenomena: rising incomes and improved sanitation. We focus on Paris during the key period of the health transition (1880-1914) and assemble a longitudinal data set on mortality, income, and connection to sewer for each of the city’s 80 neighborhoods. We show that life expectancy in Paris was not very different from the rest of the country –around 50 years at age 5– but the difference between best and worst neighborhoods exceeded 10 years. These huge mortality differentials are strongly related to a variety of income indicators. Over time, mortality across neighborhoods first diverged and then converged. This pattern cannot be explained by variation in income or fixed neighborhood characteristics. It is due to the gradual diffusion of sewers that were adopted faster in rich neighborhoods than in poor ones.

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at reviewing the existing qualitative and quantitative data resources eligible to supporting studies of human longevity, in the field of historical demography, of colonial Brazil. It proposes exploring the informative potentialities of the vast nominative colonial records of Minas Gerais. The expected result is a descriptive inventory of the sources suitable for empirical investigation into various aspects of the social life of a highly urbanized context, searching for useful demographic serial data scattered among various types of registers. For some representative towns, the wide institutional spectrum of documentation produced a rich assembly of data, which covers nearly all social aspects of the populations. Contrary to the common sense, detailed information on individuals of the lowest social strata, namely slaves and freedmen, can be recovered from regular nominative listings of such populations.
Second, it intends to present individual cases of good data quality, for all social groups considered, serving as an initial validation of the usefulness of the sources in comparative studies of similarities and differences in the aging processes.

The aim of the proposed study is to investigate whether exposure in early life to water-born infectious diseases leads to permanent scarring and increase in old-age mortality. Given exposure to infectious diseases
during childhood and in-utero increases the risk of developing chronic conditions at the old age, then cohorts born in large cities before the water filtration system was widely implemented would also have higher mortality than cohorts born afterwards, or those born in rural areas. This applies in particular to black population as compared to the white one. Based on the data from Social Security Medicare Part B merged at Duke University with the Numerical Identification Files from the Social Security Administration, the proposed study would use the individual level information on exact place of birth. The method applied is premiminary a visual assesment of mortality surfaces presenting data where random noise was eliminated with two-dimentional P-spline smoothing methods and estimation of a series of Cox proportional hazard models. Result of a preliminary study demonstrate that cohorts born in Washigton DC, Atlanta GA, Baltimore MA after the water purification was started on large scale had significantly lower mortality than cohorts born before this date, as compared to the total population of the country.